The School Survival Forums are permanently retired. If you need help with quitting school, unsupportive parents or anything else, there is a list of resources on the Help Page.

To everyone who joined these forums at some point, and got discouraged by the negativity and left after a while (or even got literally scared off): I'm sorry.

I wasn't good enough at encouraging people to be kinder, and removing people who refuse to be kind. Encouraging people is hard, and removing people creates conflict, and I hate conflict... so that's why I wasn't better at it.

I was a very, very sensitive teen. The atmosphere of this forum as it is now, if it had existed in 1996, would probably have upset me far more than it would have helped.

I can handle quite a lot of negativity and even abuse now, but that isn't the point. I want to help people. I want to help the people who need it the most, and I want to help people like the 1996 version of me.

I'm still figuring out the best way to do that, but as it is now, these forums are doing more harm than good, and I can't keep running them.

Thank you to the few people who have tried to understand my point of view so far. I really, really appreciate you guys. You are beautiful people.

Everyone else: If after everything I've said so far, you still don't understand my motivations, I think it's unlikely that you will. We're just too different. Maybe someday in the future it might make sense, but until then, there's no point in arguing about it. I don't have the time or the energy for arguing anymore. I will focus my time and energy on people who support me, and those who need help.

-SoulRiser

The forums are mostly read-only and are in a maintenance/testing phase, before being permanently archived. Please use this time to get the contact details of people you'd like to keep in touch with. Send me a message if you'd like to keep in touch with me & Steve.

Please do not make a mirror copy of the forums in their current state - things will still change, and some people have requested to be able to edit or delete some of their personal info.

So, the idea is that someone who wants to learn, wanders in here and states that they want to learn x, y and z or a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i and j or whatever. The rest of us respond with throwing links at one another and discussing said links. After throwing links and comments and whatever else all over the place, this is refined into a more presentable format which is then sent over to the requester (via pm or email?), all in one neat learning bundle!

I don't know how well it will work but let's give it a try shall we?

If I seem rude to you, please call me on it gently.
One thing (among many others) school couldn't teach you.

This is an ancient account I have not used in a long time. My views have changed much in the intervening months and years.

Nonetheless, I refuse to clean it up. Pretending that I've held my current views since the beginning of time is what we in the industry call a lie. Asking people to do so contributes to moralistic self-loathing. "See, those people have nothing damning! I do! I'm truly vile!"

Because you can never be a good person with a single blemish on the moral record, I thought that simply entertaining some thoughts made me irredeemable. Though I don't care for his writing style, William Faulkner presents a good counterexample. He went from being a typical Southern racist to supporting the civil rights movement. These days we'd yell at him for that, probably.

People are allowed to change their views.

Nevertheless, this period of my life has informed some of how I am today. In good ways and bad ways. To purge it would be to do a disservice to history. Perhaps it will not make anyone sympathetic, but it may help someone understand.

If, after reading all this, you still decide to use the post above as evidence that I am evil today, ask yourself if you have never disagreed with the moral code you now follow. In all likelihood you did, at some point. If some questions are verboten, and the answer is "how dare you ask that," don't expect your ideological opponents to ever change their minds.

Also check out Justin Schwamm's Tres Columnae Project, a story-based approach to learning and using Latin. The idea of this site is to transform how Latin is learned form the traditional textbook focus to a form where people collaboratively read and write stories. He also has a blog, Joyful Latin Learning, that's actually more about questioning and changing education than Latin itself.

I think a good next step would be to organize these links, maybe even visually represent them or write descriptions of how they're used, how much time they take, and so on.

One of the biggest problems with giant lists of resources is it can be hard to figure out what strategy to use to dig through all of them in a meaningful way. Learning things in depth, especially a language, requires a certain amount of diving in and engaging with some kind of material. But that, in turn, requires ignoring everything else for a while.

So, some kind of strategy or plan might be worth developing. In order to do that, one question is how much time you plan to spend, say daily or weekly. Another question is whether there are any general principles or guides for learning foreign languages in general.

One approach is to find others who want to learn the language and practice with them. Livemocha is one site that helps people do that.

Here's David's critical review of Rosetta Stone. He has a bunch of other videos on independent learning and language learning as well. Personally I think an even more important question is whether it's worth spending time learning via the Rosetta Stone process, or if there's some other way. I've used the program some in the past, but never stuck with it for very long. Anyone else have experience with it or language learning?

Do you think you could do the organisations if I find the info for you, xcriteria? Or at least some of them, as an example of what to do with them? From looking at them, Wheellock's Latin reckons a lesson a week. As for learning foreign languages in general, I'm not much help with speaking them but if you want to read or write them - try looking up their etymology - lots of Latin, Greek and French have got smuggled into English that way.

If I seem rude to you, please call me on it gently.
One thing (among many others) school couldn't teach you.

(05-16-2013 08:18 AM)Trekkie_Aspie Wrote: Do you think you could do the organisations if I find the info for you, xcriteria? Or at least some of them, as an example of what to do with them? From looking at them, Wheellock's Latin reckons a lesson a week.

I can try. I'm not sure what format would be best, exactly. One way to think about it is to make a Personal Learning Plan that covers multiple subjects that a person wants to learn. More or less, a learning pack would kind of be the content for the plan.

This article from UnCollege has a good summary of the process of going from a plan to carrying it out:

(05-16-2013 08:18 AM)Trekkie_Aspie Wrote: As for learning foreign languages in general, I'm not much help with speaking them but if you want to read or write them - try looking up their etymology - lots of Latin, Greek and French have got smuggled into English that way.

Yeah, studying etymology is a great place to start with those languages. I'm not fluent in any foreign language, but I've been learning quite a bit of Spanish working on a translating and subtitling gig of video footage. Sometimes having a project or other situation that motivates looking up the words can help push things along motivationally.

Brainiac, what else do you want to learn, and roughly how much time per day or week might you want to spend "learning?" I think a good learning plan would take those things into account.

Also, have you tried learning languages before? What approaches have worked for you with learning in general? How do you like to learn?

Finally, some kind of accountability or feedback system might make a good part of any learning pack. Nothing like a traditional grade, but some way to demonstrate learning, motivate further progress, and get a sense of how well you're doing. How might that be done? (Accredible might work well for that, maybe combined with posting updates to a blog or forum thread.)

"Well, I'm also studying C++ programming at the moment, well I "re-began" today from the start.

I intend to spend between 1-3 hours of my day learning. I've actually gone over Latin, very lightly that is(just a skim over the surface to see what I probably need to learn). In general, my learning of language starts from learning the alphabet and pronunciation, then the vocab. This will help me start reading(since reading is my strongest skill), from there I enter grammar.

I usually like to learn through reading, supplemented with video/audio. I rarely enjoy interaction and usually shun it(I have a long and terrible history with homework, rarely ever doing it). Reading and taking notes is usually enough, but languages have pronunciations which need audio to learn and grammar, which videos can help with."

If I seem rude to you, please call me on it gently.
One thing (among many others) school couldn't teach you.

I looked through the Latin resources more. I guess it's worth just exploring them a bit. I recommend checking out Tres Columnae and see what you think of it. There are some various explanations of what it's about on the site. The first story starts at http://tconline.trescolumnae.com/index.p...primaprima -- and by listening and clicking through subsequent pages, a story builds up.

TC is still being developed, but I think the underlying concept of learning about a story with characters can help make learning more meaningful than memorizing words alone. Of course, studying words themselves and all that can be useful as well.

Another resource I forgot to mention is Operation LAPIS, an alternate reality game approach to learning Latin. The catch with this is that it costs $40/month and it's a 2-year program. Still, it doesn't hurt to check it out. I think game-based learning like this could be adapted to a variety of topics. Maybe even making an ARG could be part of the learning process for various subjects!

Operation LAPIS is a two-year introductory curriculum in Roman civilization and the Latin language in the form of mission to save the world by learning how to find and read a crucial inscription. As a member of a team of operatives controlling young Romans in a text-based simulation of the ancient world, you will need to gain the skills that will let you locate and analyze the LAPIS SAECULORUM: the stone of the ages.﻿

The creators of Operation LAPIS, Roger Travis and his team at The Pericles Group, are big advocates of game-based and story-based learning in general, as is Justin Schwamm. I've interacted with both of them on G+, and when it comes to changing education in general, these approaches could really revolutionize learning. Justin wrote about how Operation LAPIS and Trescolumnae differ on his blog at Joyful Latin Learning: Celebrating Success, II:

Quote: The folks at LAPIS say they’re building a role-playing game “wrapped in” an alternate-reality game. Communities form in those kinds of games, but they’re a result and a tool, not a goal. Participants “play” the narrative, but the narrative itself is controlled by someone else. I’d call that an untextbook.

The Tres Columnae Project begins as a learning community – a community playing and creating a story game together. Within the overall arc of that story, members add their own characters, their own situations, their own narratives large or small. Ownership and control of the narrative belong to them as much as to me! I’d call that an antitextbook.

Does any of that sound interesting?

I think that in general, this packet thing is going to require some interaction between the learners and whoever else is helping to put things together, some iterative feedback and so on. Do any of the other above resources seem in line with how you see yourself learning?

learning journals

Another thing to try is to have people record daily journals of what they engage with, and somehow share those. Maybe on a blog, for example, or on a real-time document collaboration platform like Rizzoma.

One advantage of a learning journal is that it can provide a record of what you actually do, even if you go off-plan, find some new resource, or get fed up with things. That can provide feedback for you or others to see what kind of changes might be useful. And documenting your progress can serve all kinds of roles.

Yeah, that sounds good. Video journals or even notes on paper can be useful, too.

Skype or Hangouts can also be useful as well to actually "check in" and discuss roadblocks and so on.

Accredible is a bit more for documenting highlights than accountability, but ideally there would be highlights on a regular basis. I'm thinking of how I can use accredible or other means to document all my wasted time in school, including with some of my bad report cards.

Maybe we could find out how many people would be interested in checking in on learning on a regular basis. I've been putting a lot of my casual learning and learning conversations into Rizzoma, which is a collaborative document editing/discussion site kind of like Google Docs mixed with forum threads. It's easy to login with Google or Facebook.

There's a little bit of a learning curve but basically multiple people can add comments and co-edit a document, and it's easy to incorporate images and videos and add nested comments. Feel free to give it a try.

(05-16-2013 08:14 AM)xcriteria Wrote: I think a good next step would be to organize these links, maybe even visually represent them or write descriptions of how they're used, how much time they take, and so on.

One of the biggest problems with giant lists of resources is it can be hard to figure out what strategy to use to dig through all of them in a meaningful way. Learning things in depth, especially a language, requires a certain amount of diving in and engaging with some kind of material. But that, in turn, requires ignoring everything else for a while.

So, some kind of strategy or plan might be worth developing. In order to do that, one question is how much time you plan to spend, say daily or weekly. Another question is whether there are any general principles or guides for learning foreign languages in general.

One approach is to find others who want to learn the language and practice with them. Livemocha is one site that helps people do that.

Here's David's critical review of Rosetta Stone. He has a bunch of other videos on independent learning and language learning as well. Personally I think an even more important question is whether it's worth spending time learning via the Rosetta Stone process, or if there's some other way. I've used the program some in the past, but never stuck with it for very long. Anyone else have experience with it or language learning?

Duolingo is free and an awesome language learning site/app.
I'm currently learning, Spanish and Esperanto.https://www.duolingo.com/

"I’M BEGGING YOU, PRINCE ZUKO! It’s time for you to look inward and begin asking yourself the big question: who are you and what do YOU want?"
" While it is always best to believe in one’s self, a little help from others can be a great blessing"
-Uncle Iroh(Avatar: the Last Airbender)